Archive for August 2009

One of the big stories of the week — and possibly of the year — are the developments with the National Security Personnel System. NSPS, of course, is the Defense Department’s pay-for-performance system — it was the attempt by the Bush administration to develop an alternative to the government’s long-standing General Schedule pay system, which emphasizes longevity but does almost nothing to recognize performance.

There were a goal of the National Security Personnel System was to create a more flexible personnel system that aligns more clearly with the Defense Department’s goals.

Here is how the final report of the Defense Business Board’s task group on NSPS describes it:

In 2003, Congress enacted the NSPS. The aim of the NSPS was to establish a more flexible, mission-based personnel management system that linked to DoD’s mission and organizational goals…

Today, as the DoD faces an almost unprecedented tempo of operations, there is an urgent need to align the Department’s resources to its priorities and to rebuild critical capabilities within the workforce. Successful performance management systems have the potential to enhance organizational performance and drive effective results. Flexible compensation and classification tools are required to support the recruitment and retention of high quality employees.

Most managers — and even most government workers — acknowledge that the government’s GS system just doesn’t work well. But many also acknowledge that NSPS didn’t do it well either.

The Bush administration had a big misstep with NSPS: They refused to include the government employee unions in the discussions about the program. That being said, the employee unions are, by in large, opposed to changing the pay for performance system.

1. Initiate a reconstruction of the NSPS within DoD that begins with a challenge to the assumptions and design of NSPS. The Task Group recommends a “reconstruction” of the NSPS. A “fix” could not address the depth of the systemic problems discovered. The Task Group does not recommend an abolishment of the NSPS because the performance management system that has been created is achieving alignment of employee goals with organizational goals.

The reconstruction should include a true engagement of the workforce in designing needed changes and implementation. Finally, the reconstruction should include desired outcomes and data collection to measure results.

2. Reestablish a DoD commitment to partnership and collaborating with employees through their unions.

3. Establish DoD’s commitment to strategic management and investment in career civil servants.

4. Continue the existing moratorium on transitions of more work units into NSPS until DoD can present a corrective action plan to address identified issues, supported by data that the implemented corrective actions will address the identified issues.

I have pulled together a number of resources about NSPS because, it seems to me, this is a big issue and could be a real opportunity for government.

Rudy deLeon is the Senior Vice President of National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. He also served as the chairman of the Defense Business Board’s NSPS task group. Hear that conversation here.

We should also note that the companies — Citrix, HP, Microsoft, Intel and the Professional Services Council — are taking the money that people would save tonight and donating it to the Wounded Warrior Project, which works to “raise awareness and enlist the public’s aid for the needs of severely injured service men and women… help severely injured service members aid and assist each other, and… provide unique, direct programs and services to meet the needs of severely injured service members.”

Here is the release that the groups put out:

Today, Aug. 27, is Power IT Down Day, an initiative through which Citrix, HP, Microsoft, Intel and the Professional Services Council encourage government and industry to show their commitment to responsible energy usage.

Simply put, we’re asking that government and industry shut down their computers, printers and peripherals at the end of the work day today. As of this morning, more than 4,400 people have pledged to join Power IT Down Day. To illustrate how important this issue is, keep in mind:

* Last year, over 2,800 individuals signed up for the inaugural Power IT Down Day.
* The 4,400 people who pledged to Power IT Down this year represent over 57,000 kilowatt hours saved. This equates to more than $5,700 dollars saved in just one night.
* Imagine if just these 4,400 individuals powered IT down for a whole year. That’s a savings of more than $2M.
* Now imagine if one percent of the country’s 1.8 million civilian government employees powered it down for one year.

Saving government and environmental resources is not just in the imagination any more. It’s real and it’s concrete and it can be done.

And, to represent how the money saved from powering IT down could be put to good use, the Power IT Down Day partners will donate more than $20,000 to Wounded Warrior Project, a group that represents those brave Americans who sacrificed so much.

As you may know, I love books… and I love reading… so I love seeing what other people are reading.

Along those lines, I’m always fascinated what other people are reading.

I read all sorts of things — I have often joked that I’m one of the few people who read magazines ranging from The New Yorker and The Economist to US Magazine. And my range of books is equally broad — and I’m often reading at least two books at a time. Currently, for example, I’m reading the Twilight vampire books as well as a book recommended by DOD deputy CIO Dave Winnergren and Navy CIO Robert Carey… Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor by Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, James O’Toole, and Patricia Ward Biederman. (If I can get Bennis on the air, this might just be a Federal News Radio Book Club book.)

Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

Dickerson goes on to analyze what this list tells us about the President.

The Obama selection is not overtly controversial. In 2006, Bush’s list included The Great Influenza, about the 1918 flu. If Obama were reading that today while his White House was issuing a new report about the H1N1 virus, he’d start a national panic. But his list is also clearly not poll-tested. Women played a key role in Obama’s victory in 2008. They’re swing voters. And yet all of Obama’s authors are white men. The subject of the longest book, John Adams, is a dead white male. Obama couldn’t get away with that in an election year, and, given his aides’ penchant for cleaning up little things like this, we’ll soon see the president with a copy of Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women.

The proposal to consolidate more than 1,200 area federal workers in either a new or existing building downtown was thought to have been cleared by Washington agencies last fall when the GSA and Office of Management and Budget finally forwarded the plan to Congress.

Most of the federal workers are now at the Bannister Federal Complex in south Kansas City, which is gradually being vacated by its government tenants.

But in June, the Senate Environmental and Public Works Commission asked Anthony Costa, GSA acting commissioner for public buildings, for more financial analysis. Bond suspected the move had been requested by GSA bureaucrats as part of an effort to scuttle the Kansas City plan.

In the column, I note that I did a Amazon.com search for books about leadership, and it probably will not surprise anyone that my search came up with 348,433 hits. So on one level, we understand it—leadership is important. And I went on to tell the story about EPA’s Jeremy Ames, who did the first government open contest — in this case, for people who created a public service announcement around radon gas. (See the videos from here.) And I noted in the column that the great thing about the videos is that then EPA CIO Molly O’Neill and then EPA Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock didn’t know it was going on. My conclusion was that was a demonstration of transformation at EPA — the fact that people felt safe enough to try something out that could change the way the organization does business — it seems very powerful to me.

His arguement: There is way too much focus on leadership — and not nearly enough focus on management. To that end, Balutis did an Amazon.com search about management and found 105,818 hits – less than a third of those on leadership.

As government programs and agencies today have become more complex, the ability to make them work has diminished. As we review the government landscape today, it is littered with failures: FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina, the Food and Drug Administration’s inability to stop dangerous foods from reaching dining tables, the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s not keeping lead-painted toys out of stores, the collapse of financial markets, outrageous Ponzi schemes, and on and on. Are these failures of leadership? There might be an element of that. But, more likely, they are failures of management; they are failures to execute.

We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow morning, and while I don’t think Balutis’s point necessarily distracts from the need for good leadership, it doesn’t mean that management isn’t absoluteely essential — and perhaps way too overlooked.